Men were writers and women were researchers. That’s the way it was when Lynn Povich and 45 of her colleagues at Newsweek decided to take a stand.
In 1970, they banded together and became the first women in the media to file a lawsuit on the grounds of sex discrimination — resulting in the breaking of numerous barriers for professional women.
Povich, who became Newsweek’s first female senior editor in 1975, wrote “The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses and Changed the Workplace.” Her memoir, published in 2012, offers a compelling account of the events and trailblazers involved in the historic case.
The book has inspired the TV series “Good Girls Revolt,” now streaming on Amazon.
The series is fictionalized — it takes place at the made-up magazine News of the Week, and most of the characters are invented. But it captures the general gestalt of the time and place of the “revolt,” from the blatant gender bias to the thrills of landing a scoop in the newsroom.
“It’s a very personal story for me and my friends,” Povich told JTA. “I thought it would be difficult, given what the demands of TV and streaming are these days, to get it to be the way it really was versus what has to be done to make it an exciting, dramatic show.
“We were just a group of young women at Newsweek. And I thought it would give the [show’s] writers more leeway to create some backstories.”
The series “catches the spirit” of her story, Povich said. “The actual storyline of the women organizing and ultimately filing the charges is correct. I think they caught the spirit of a newsroom … The late ‘60s and early ‘70s were very exciting, and you have a sense of what the times were like.”
The characters, she added, are an amalgamation. “There are little pieces of me in all of these people. I think that most of us would, in this sense, identify with the sense of how thrilling it was to break a story or get a scoop. But the personal stories of all these women are completely different.”
In a sense, her fight for equal rights began when she was a teen and asked to have a bat mitzvah.
“We belonged to an Orthodox synagogue until I was about 10 and my parents were very observant. We had Shabbat every Friday night. We went to synagogue on all of the holidays and we had big family gatherings on all of the holidays,” she said.
“When I was about 10, my parents moved to a Conservative synagogue in Washington, D.C. I was one of the first women in that congregation to be bat mitzvahed in 1956, when women were bat mitzvahed on Friday nights, not Saturday, and you couldn’t read the Torah,” she recalled.
Povich had pushed for the bat mitzvah. Her brothers were bar mitzvahed, “so I wanted to be bat mitzvahed,” she said. “And, in fact, when they said to me they wanted me to read everything in English, I said, ‘My brothers read it in Hebrew, so I want to read it in Hebrew.’ So I read it in Hebrew because I insisted. I was proud to be one of the first young women in our shul to step on the bimah, read Hebrew and become an adult in the eyes of my religion.”
She remains observant and has Shabbat at home with her husband and two children in New York, where she is a member of a Conservative synagogue. “I would say that my sense of Judaism is traditional and familial and cultural that I both enjoy and am proud of,” she said.
“I do think becoming a bat or bar mitzvah is incredibly important when you look back. We are part of a long history of our people and our survival.
“I believe strongly in preserving our religion, traditions and culture. I’m so glad I did it. It was meaningful to me then and now.”
Povich continues to stand up for women. She belongs to the International Women’s Media Foundation that supports women journalists around the world, and sits on the advisory board of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.
The Newsweek suit “was a very radicalizing action for me,” she said. “Organizing with other women and together realizing that you actually can make change set me on my path for the rest of my life.”